Month: September 2007

Adam Daifallah reviews Tom Flanagan's new book, Harper's Team: Behind the Scenes in the Conservative Rise to Power in today's Globe and Mail. Flanagan, the University of Calgary political scientist had key leadership roles in three of the four campaigns the Harper team has run over the last five years. Flanagan himself also has a piece in the Globe – a condensed version of the last chapter of his book in which he offers “The Ten Commandments to Conservative Campaigning.”

I've just finished Flanagan's book myself. Because part of my job involves covering the Conservative caucus, I was keen to see what Flanagan had to say about some of the things I've been reporting on for the last couple of years. For many key events, Flanagan and I were on opposite sides of a door in the Centre Block — he was on the inside and I was standing outside with a microphone.
I'm going to put a series of separate posts here from the notes and questions I had while while reading his book.

Here's one oddity: On page 253 of the edition I have, there is a very funny typographical error. Flanagan is talking about the 2006 election campaign in which Harper laid out his famous “Five Priorities” and then the Conservatives contrasted their list with Prime Minister Paul Martin who had many, many more priorities. Flanagan means to write, at this point, “…we put out a list of fifty-six priorities that Martin at one time or another had declared …” but instead, the typesetters published “…we put out a list of fifty-sex priorities that Martin had at one time or another declared …” I assume only Sheila Martin would be able to tell if Prime Minister Martin kept his commitments …

The NDP, of course, had a big night this week in Montreal, stealing the riding of Outremont away from the Liberals, who had held it since 1935. That's new MP Thomas Mulcair celebrating with Jack Layton in the photo on the left.

But if you'd like to see more photos from the NDP's big night, this link, passed along by an NDP friend, is a Flickr photo set of some scenes backstage, if you will, at NDP HQ in Montreal on the big night. You'll spot, among others, NDP MPs Peggy Nash and Alexa McDonough.

Democrats have a quandary. They have at least two nominees that, if an election were held right now, would whip just about anyone the Republicans picked.
A new poll says Americans would vote for both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barrack Obama ahead of any Republican challenger, including the most recent entrance into the Republican race, Fred Thompson.
The Hart/Newhouse poll done for the Wall Street Journal and NBC shows that, if a presidential election were held right now and it was Clinton vs. Giuliani, Clinton would score 49 per cent of the votes, compared to 42 per cent for Rudy. She'd beat Thompson 50 to 41; and would whip Romney 51 to 38.
Obama would score 47 per cent of the vote if he was the Democrat nominee fighting Republican nominee Thompson, who would score 38 per cent. Obama does even better against Romney than Hillary — 51 to 34. The pollster did not ask about a Barrack/Giuliani matchup.
When asked, “What is your preference for the outcome of the 2008 presidential election––that a Democrat be elected president or that a Republican be elected president?”, 49 per cent said they preferred a Democrat win; 36 per cent want the Republicans back.
George W. Bush, incidentally, continues to be viewed mighty unfavourably by his citizens. When asked, “Do you approve or disapprove of the job that George W. Bush is doing as president?”, 66 per cent — two in three — told the pollster they disapprove and just 29 per cent — less than one in three — said they approve.
For this poll, 1,002 adults were interviewed between Sept. 7 and 10. The pollster says the survey is accurate to within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

The economists at Toronto Dominion Bank were in the paper this morning saying that the rapid and surprising rise of the loonie vs the U.S. greenback hasn't done much to lower prices of U.S.-sourced goods here in Canada. Now, Doug Porter at BMO Nesbitt Burns, is saying much the same thing:

With the Canadian dollar charging to parity for the first time since November 1976, we have updated our study of three months ago with a few new products on how Canadian retail prices have responded to the loonie’s historic run. The main conclusion stands: It may be a Brave New World for the Canadian dollar, but the Song Remains the Same for the most part for consumers. While we have discovered some fractional narrowing in the prices of some goods over the past three months, the currency’s latest sprint has completely offset those modest moves. Thus, we find that the average price gap on a basket of assorted goods is now roughly 24% at today’s exchange rate—that is, Canadian dollar prices are 24% higher than U.S. dollar prices on identical goods. While it is unrealistic to expect prices to instantaneously adjust across the board to a currency move, this is nevertheless an unsustainable gap. Given that no-one requires a calculator to make these comparisons, the pressure up and down Canada’s supply chain to bring these prices into closer alignment is bound to intensify immensely in the months ahead. This ultimately should help keep a check on consumer price trends, and will thus further reduce the need for much additional Bank of Canada tightening down the line when the current credit market turmoil passes.

This morning's papers will all have news about the relatively important by-elections in Quebec. For federalists, the good news is that the separatists took it on the chin. A senior official in the Prime Minister's Office sent me this one-liner late last night:
Bloc is “Down 18 pts in Roberval, down 14 in St. Hyacinthe, down 18 points in Outremont.”
Indeed, the poor showing by the Bloc was about the only silver lining for Stephane Dion and the Liberals who, in losing Outremont to the NDP, lost a seat that had been Liberal red since 1935.
But, looking at last night's snapshot, it seems even bleaker than that for the federal Liberals in Quebec. As my colleague Robert Fife reported last night, the Liberals are marginalized outside the island of Montreal.
In St. Hyacinthe, west of Montreal, where the BQ held on to the seat, the Liberals finished fourth, behind the NDP and Conservatives. In Roberval, they placed third but, as in St. Hyacinthe, with less than 10 per cent of the vote.
And what happened to the Green Party? If there are questions this morning about Stephane Dion's leadership of the Liberals in Quebec, how about questions for Elizabeth May?
Despite polls over the last year that have shown voter preference for the Greens peaking at about 10 per cent and with environmental issues consistently at the top of mind by Quebec voters (particularly compared to voters in other regions), the Greens did bupkus.
In St. Hyacinthe, Greens snagged just 3.7 per cent; in Roberval, just 1.7 per cent; and in Outremont, just 2.2 per cent. By comparison, in the 2006 general election, Greens won 3.87 per cent in St. Hyacinthe; 4.34 per cent in Roberval; and 4.82 per cent in Outremont.

I've got a pretty good day job but, if truth be told, it's my professional dream to be a theatre critic. I tried once. While covering city hall at the Orillia Packet & Times when I was young and single, I volunteered to travel all over southern Ontario to review about two dozen summer theatres — from Ganonoque to Gravenhurst to Grand Bend, I used to say — along with the fall and winter seasons in Toronto. CBC Radio's Ontario Morning would put me on once a week in the summer to talk about the plays I'd seen and they were kind enough to send me a hundred bucks or so every month for the privilege.
Later, when I moved up the Thomson newspaper chain from Orillia to the Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal, I tried to carry on with my tryout to be a real theatre critic but there just wasn't a whole lot of theatre in Northwestern Ontario — and it was a six-hour drive to the Guthrie in Minneapolis (which, for the two seasons I saw there, is vastly overrated and doesn't hold a candle to the work done at Stratford and Shaw, but I digress …)
But it's tough to crack the professional theatre critic lineup. Indeed, I would say it's easier to become a professional actor than to become a professional newspaper critic in Canada if only because there might be two dozen professional theatre critics in this country — and I may be overestimating here — but there's got to be at least a few thousand professional actors. (When I say professional here, I'm talking about earning all or most of your annual income by reviewing live theatre or performing live theatre)
And so we come to John Barry who writes theatre criticism for a newspaper in Baltimore. He doesn't make a lot of money but perhaps he'll get some great notoriety for this charming from-the-heart essay on reviewing theatre:

Okay, it was a crappy production. Tom Stoppard's going to take the bullet. Not that I have anything against Stoppard. It's just that if he hadn't written the play, I wouldn't have wasted my rainy night trying to squeeze something useful out of an amateur production. I start to type: Stoppard is funny. He's smart, he makes you think, he makes you drink. The problem is that unless someone puts a cork in the Merlot at some point, he won't shut up…
That's it, Tom. Take that cork and shove it. And another thing. If I'm only getting paid $55 for a sidebar review, don't tell me to bone up on Richard Feynman if I want to get the jokes. And the actors themselves. Think of them. They have day jobs. You know what a day job is? Did they ever teach you that at Oxford?
It happens every time. I can't slam bad community theatre. I want to. I want to be contrarian. I want people to hang on my next word. The dream will never die: getting drunk on martinis at Sardi's after closing down a Disney-sponsored Broadway production, and possibly, later in life, getting a chance to rant on a weekly basis in the opinion pages of the New York Times [Read the rest of the piece]

As I've always said, the issue of “are bloggers journalists” matters not (or at least it should not matter) a whit to bloggers, journalists, or their viewers/readers but it is a very big deal to the 'gatekeepers' of the world. Bush's gatekeepers recently decided that the J-tent, if you'll let me call it that, was big enough for another ten to enter. And the new ten in the tent just happen to be bloggers:

President Reaches Out to a Friendly Circle in New Media
The day after his prime-time speech on Iraq, President Bush sat down for a round-table interview not with traditional White House reporters but with bloggers who focus on military issues, including two participating by video link from Baghdad.
Judging from some of the accounts of the Friday meeting, the president offered up little news. Here is what one of the 10 bloggers, Ward Carroll of Military.com, described from his notes as some of Bush's most notable comments:
• “This strategy is my strategy.”
• “I'm defining a horizon of peace.”
• “I don't mind people attacking me. . . . That's politics . . . but I do mind people impugning the integrity of our generals.”
Still, the hour-long meeting in the Roosevelt Room offered Bush another opportunity to break through what he sees as the filter of the traditional news media, while also reaching out to the providers of a new source of information for soldiers, their families and others who follow the conflict in Iraq closely… [Read the rest of the story]

Wouldn't it be great if Canada's fighter planes — the CF-18 — could be deployed to Afghanistan where they might be able to play a supporting role to the 2,500-odd Canadian troops there? You're right, it would. But, sadly, Canada's CF-18s are shut out of any theatre of war where our allies are are operating because Canada's fighter jets simply don't have the right gear.

If you want to put your fighters into the same theatre as U.S. and U.K. forces, your fighters must — and I underline, must — be equipped with what I'll call “smart bomb” technology. Remember in Gulf War I when we saw video of a missile zeroing in on a target and then explode? Well, that's smart bomb stuff. The U.S. have it. The U.K. has it. Even the French have it. (That's why they were able to deploy Mirage fighters into Afghanistan recently to support NATO troops there.) But Canada's fighter jets don't have it.

We know we need it, mind you. Five years ago, Canada's Air Force generals started the ball rolling to put these systems on our fighter jets.

But now, as my colleague Graham Richardson reports tonight, we seem to be a ways off from getting it.

Bureaucrats at Public Works and Government Services Canada awarded a $150-million contract to upgrade our fighter jets so that they would have this capability to Lockheed Martin. This will be Lockheed Martin's first contract to upgrade CF-18s with this capability.
Meanwhile, Northrup Grumman, which also bid on the Canadian contract and have done lots of these upgrades, is appealing the PWGSC decision and, so far, is doing very well with that appeal.
Northrup, I might add, has won this contract against the same competitors in six other countries — including the U.S. and Australia — versus the same competitors but couldn't do it in Canada.

So, to recap: In 2009, Canada's ground forces combat configuration in Afghanistan almost certainly will end. If the government is thinking about sending Canadian fighter jets post-2009 over there to help, forget about it. They can't go until they get the mandatory piece of kit that just about every other one of our allies has. And the work of getting that kick has been delayed by some bureaucratic bungling.

Oh — and here's the kicker: Canadian taxpayers have already forked over $140-million for the smart bombs that we can't yet fire because our planes haven't got the smart bomb firing system installed yet.